


Ambŭlātĭo

by fraisemilk



Series: Onomatopoeia [3]
Category: Gintama
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Post Joui War, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 19:47:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4361927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraisemilk/pseuds/fraisemilk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sleeping under the sky; sleeping then remembering you have to wake up, standing up and walking on empty wretched roads. You. You, in half-burned woods, in-between deserted houses. People looking, people watching.<br/>(Katsura's wanderings after the war)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ambŭlātĭo

Sleeping under the sky; sleeping then remembering you have to wake up, standing up and walking on empty wretched roads. You. You, in half-burned woods, in-between deserted houses. People looking, people watching. People fighting, and their groans echoing, loud when they are distant, terrible when thunder echoes their torment, violent like nothing else can be, except perhaps soldiers.

 

* * *

 

You stand up. The trunk you were sitting on has left dirty streaks on your clothes. Your joints ache like they belong to an old man. Then again, maybe now you are, now that the war has held your body in its tight sweaty grasp.

Sleeping with nothing between you and the sky has become an habit. Your back pressed against the hard trunk of a grey tree or against the sandy ground, clutching in your battle-hardened hand the sword that has not yet been broken by a bigger weapon, you look up at the stars whenever you can; when the mass of the clouds is too thick, when the leaves of the trees hide the chattering blinking lights, when you neck hurts too much and when you are too tired, you do not bother to sleep. You walk instead. There is nothing to keep you awake now, is there? Except perhaps the rustling of heavy winds in the high grass, or the footsteps of shrews in the meadows, or the voices of the men buried in the ground.

There is something akin to nostalgia that rises in your stomach when your wanderings lead you to empty villages. Upon seeing the path of gravel that parts the rows of deserted houses, when you observe the closed-off shadows hanging above windowsills, there is a slight nudge between your ribs, below deep in your heart, aching, one only caused by bone-weary lassitude. And, as you watch the wood of what was once a door turn red under the sun’s setting glare, you can only silently weep, weep at this beauty, at this incredibly simple thing that _life_ is.

 

* * *

 

The people who are looking for you come but, led by something like hope or survival or simple dignity, you avoid them, you fight them away, you hide from them. Mix your blue shadow in the darkest shades of the mountains, fuse the smell of sweat with the smell of pines and of rain; nobody will find you there.  

You curl up under the stars and the blue Blackness. Leaves and thorns will be stuck in your hair. You couldn’t care less.

 

* * *

 

The mighty soldier’s weeping is different than the lament of the priest. For more than sadness or joy, in the hiccups of sobs and the tearing sensation growing wild in the chest, aching to free itself in a gasp of breath, there is despair; and this despair is everything if not unique in every single aspect; absolute for it knows, terrible for it is wise, tragic when it turns into the silent weeping of a lonely man.

 

* * *

 

You might die in the forest, up there on the hill; you might have a fateful encounter under the soft blue shade of the trees, finally, finally close your eyes with red dyeing the back of your tongue and a pretty flower blooming in your thoughts. That wouldn’t be so bad; dying doesn’t seem so bad anymore. Now that the old soldier is alone, he finds discomfort in the quiet of life. In the hollow of past and present, of fight and rest, of comradeship and lonely flight. “If this wandering is such an agony, why not die in bitter bright fire?” – Oh, you half-wish, you poor bone-weary, war-weary, light-weary soldier. But you know deep inside that now is not quite yet the hour.

No, it is not.

 

* * *

 

Silently, incoherently, secretly, you await the sign; the sign that will tell you: “this is over”. You often dream of how the sign will arrive; a ray of sunshine falling on the red trunk of a fallen tree. The billowing of golden smoke from the house next to the inn you inhabited at some point in your wandering. The laughter of a man in a dream; the sarcasm of a ghost in a nightmare. A patch of white snow; a drop of blood, falling on the frost covering a large, large lake.

They do not find you; in all these years anyone would imagine you’d have died somewhere in the country like a dog gone rabid. But, miracle, chance, destiny, fate, they do not find you, no, they do not. And, each time you go to sleep, you wonder about it, too.

You are at a loss;

You are lost.

Your despair makes you feel so _unsure_ of what should be different. Of things that should have stayed. You huddle under the leaking roof of an anonymous room. You get up with nothing in your thoughts. Your joints ache like they belong to the oldest of soldiers. Your muscles ache like you ran away too far. Your mind aches like you left something behind.

You dream, though, oh, you dream.

You dream that maybe the sign – was the sighs you let escape every time you crossed an empty village – was the tears you left in the forest – you dream that maybe, oh so hesitant, so shy, the sign was life itself, clinging to your weary mind, helped you walk in the dark lying deep in the mountain forests, kept you upright in the agony and the despair, made you weep like a child, for maybe, maybe the soldier did not have to die.

 

* * *

 

The first hint of a sign is footsteps; a sigh. Voices, then, young, then, a voice, rougher, older, familiar. Rougher, maybe, but definitely one you have known for years. In the corner of your eye, white cloth white hair. Two children, a man. Glasses on a child’s scowling face. A smug smile turns upside down – surprise, shock, recognition, all inscribed there in the twist of a mouth and the movements of an eyebrow half-hidden by vapory curls. You see it. You see him. The sign. The proof.

You stand up. You stand up feeling so light your body might very well be a butterfly; the thought comes then, that maybe you are the ghost, maybe you are merely the dream of the lonely soldier. What a funny thing it would be.

You speak the name, silently hoping your voice will not fill the quiet with eerie winds – will the man even _hear_?

 

* * *

 

A decade, already, has passed – years like water swirling towards the drain; years lived aimlessly. You walked the earth with the shadow of a goal; wearing on your shoulders the wings of an exhausted _caligo eurilochus_ ; a poor lost insect caught in forever and a day. Poor lost you, in pristine metal towers, in-between joyful houses. People looking, people watching. People laughing, and the whimpers of your ghosts echoing, in the streets you walked only when you could hide behind disguises.

And there it comes, the sign, the hour! The man knows you. The man recognizes you. He speaks your name: ~~Katsura~~ (Zura) Kotarou. This is you, the wretched soldier, the name he speaks is yours, oh, lonely man abandoned by fate.

Your eyes meet and you both smile. It’s simple, really. So simple you instantly feel ready to walk alongside him again.

He could tell you to leave – instead he tells you to follow them, him and the odd family he made for himself. So you do – you step on their green shadows cast upon the sun-melted asphalt, run together with the ghost who somehow managed to erase the past.

You are no longer alone in this world. You can stop your wandering now, strong-willed samurai.

What you will do from now on, it’s up to you to decide.

**Author's Note:**

> chill >:]]]
> 
> Kudos & comments are lovely!


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